Average annual loss has risen to £484,000, while spending per pupil has fallen

Three out of every 10 maintained secondary schools had budget deficits of nearly £500,000 last year, according to new figures on local authority spending that shed further light on the funding crunch hitting schools and nurseries in England.

The Department for Education figures show that more than 30% of mainstream local authority secondary schools had a financial shortfall in 2017-18, compared with just 11% five years earlier, despite government claims that education funding is at its highest level on record.

Study finds 15% of children from poorest families are active every day, compared with 22% of richest

Children from the richest families are more active than those from less affluent families, figures from Sport England show, prompting calls for a more collective effort to make sport accessible for all children.

The findings revealed the scale of the challenge to help the nation’s children be more active, the sports governing body said.

From Bristol to Nottingham, university towns across the country are facing up to the negative impacts of large student populations

It’s 1.30am on a Sunday in Redland, Bristol, and a student party is in full swing. A front door opens and a young woman comes out dressed as a frog. But this isn’t your average slice of uni mayhem: immediately, the student hired to act as doorman darts forward with a finger to his lips. In the street, departing guests whisper while they wait for their Ubers.

Their unusually considerate approach to late-night noise is based on fear of a large fine and disciplinary action from their university, which recently started cracking down, largely in response to the work of one local man. Andrew Waller started his campaigning website the Noise Pages in March this year after a rash of professionally organised student parties shattered the peace in this tight-knit neighbourhood.

Too many university staff are sceptical about dyslexia diagnoses, and fail to give students the support they need

The proportion of UK university students who are dyslexic has increased markedly in recent years, rising to around 5%. Yet there remains a significant dyslexia attainment gap: around 40% of dyslexic students achieve a 2.1 or above, compared to 52% of non-dyslexic students. Dyslexia is unrelated to intelligence, so why does this gap persist?

Unfortunately, outdated attitudes towards dyslexia among university staff prevail. Too many view it as something made up by middle-class “helicopter parents” to gain unfair advantages for their children entering university, and not the valid medical diagnosis that it actually is. Even where it is accepted as a condition rooted in an inability to match spoken sounds with their written forms, the accommodations made to level the playing field for dyslexic students are often inadequate.

A decade ago, the banks and their powerful allies tipped much of the western world into crisis. They were never going to pay for it: in Britain, a Conservative party they kept financially afloat has made sure of it. The richest 1,000 families resident in Britain – bankers and financiers among them – have more than doubled their net worth during an era of austerity and stagnating living standards. Instead, the crisis would be paid for with the future of an entire generation, not least youngsters from working-class backgrounds. Last week the BBC broadcaster Andrew Neil tweeted that he’d “treat people who want to start class war as same as race war”, in effect comparing leftists who believe in challenging gross disparities of wealth and power with white supremacists. But as the billionaire Warren Buffett put it: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

This is vandalism. It inflicts damage not just on the young people directly affected, but on the nation’s future